Arts and Activism

Many musicians and other creative artists find themselves on the front lines of conflicts over media policy and corporate control. Artists' issues include the ability to reach new audiences, creative control, and whether corporations or communities get to determine the future of our culture.

Some of the most effective strategies for media change come from community activists kicking out the jams of corporate media information blockades. This section also includes their stories.

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No one wants to know

It's 2006, and Brian De Palma can't believe his luck. Dotcom billionaire and aspiring film producer Mark Cuban offers him $5m to make a movie. About anything. The only proviso is that it has to be shot in hi-definition. Of course, De Palma jumps at the chance. He tells Cuban he'd like to make a film about the war in Iraq, Cuban hands over the $5m, deal done, everybody is happy.

Fast-forward two years: Redacted has won the prestigious Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, websites such as BoycottRedacted.com are encouraging people not to see it and De Palma has been labelled a traitor. Oh, and De Palma and Cuban have fallen out, the film-maker accusing his producer of censorship.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. After all, De Palma has spent much of the past 40 years inflaming public opinion. He has always loved to play Contrary Mary, and seems to take pleasure in offending. He has been called a misogynist (feminists were infuriated by 1980's Dressed To Kill and its conflation of stilettos, sluts and slashing) and a plagiarist (for borrowing from, or paying homage to, heroes such as Hitchcock). He has even been called a traitor before - his 1989 film Casualties Of War also showed soldiers raping and murdering, back in Vietnam. But this time it's different. In a less liberal America, his fellow countrymen seem to have had enough of him. Scan the internet and lap up the bile. One blogger writes: "This guy should be held accountable for each American death after the release of this filth. He is a treasonist, and should be stripped of his citizenship, and expelled from this country as penniless as he came into it in birth." Fox anchor Bill O'Reilly called De Palma "a true villain in our country" and wished that "FDR was president so De Palma could be imprisoned for treason... Even if you disagree with the Iraq war, even if you dislike President Bush, no loyal American should support an enterprise that incites hatred against America." Meanwhile, US critic Michael Medved focused his criticism on the film. "It could be the worst movie I've ever seen," he said.

The true surprise is that America has not simply turned its back on De Palma's war film, it has turned its back on all Iraq war films. Not even Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie or Robert Redford can entice Americans into the cinema to explore Iraq. What has changed? After all, war movies have been a Hollywood staple. Even hugely unpopular wars, such as Vietnam, have produced hugely popular films such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July, all of them Oscar winners. Yet look at the figures for the latest batch, and it seems that all you need to do is shout Iraq to have the public running in droves from the cinema.

Redacted is based on the gang rape, murder and burning of 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, by US soldiers in March 2006. The soldiers also killed her parents and younger sister. Redacted means edited or revised to make suitable for publication - De Palma's point is that the authorities have not allowed us to see what we have done to the people of Iraq. Access has been limited, images have been censored, and the few that have been seen have often contradicted the official version of events. De Palma was determined to tell a story that showed the full horror of the Iraq war.

Rather than watching a movie, we seem to be eavesdropping on the very worst of humanity, as his semi-deranged squaddies cross into the heart of darkness. His soldiers refer to the Iraqis as "sand niggers"; they say killing them, or "lighting them up", is like stamping out cockroaches; they mock the suggestion that they might feel guilty for pumping a pregnant woman full of lead. "You can't afford remorse - you have remorse, you get weak; you get weak, you die. Simple as that," one character says.

The film is shot in segments. There is a squaddy's version of events (the character Angel Salazar is recording the action in Iraq, and hoping his video diary Tell Me No Lies will get him into film school when he returns); a documentary in French about routine searches at checkpoints; and blogs from soldiers and their families. All three elements are fiction, created by De Palma, coming together, bit by fractured bit, to tell the appalling story. This is a very modern form of cinéma vérité, a dramatic reconstruction that does not allow for the traditional comforts of cinema - narrative drive, beauty, recognisable stars, redemption. Redacted is cinema at its most grimy and unforgiving.

The film was fictionalised for legal reasons. But barely - instead of being 14, the raped girl in the film is 15. Early on in Redacted, one of the squad is blown up by an improvised explosive device and another is kidnapped and beheaded by fundamentalists. Their distraught buddies lose their senses and exact a grotesque revenge. De Palma's camera does not turn away from the atrocity. He has never been one for subtlety or suggestion. His critics say that he glories in the explicit depiction of depravity.

I meet the film-maker in Paris, where he once lived. He is in his late 60s and as combative as ever. He is a hard man to like. Grumpy, growly and impatient, he's not the most obvious choice as a spokesman for humanity.

De Palma asks the same question again and again - where are the pictures? "As an American taxpayer I am financing a war that I totally don't believe in; and if we're going to finance the bombing and destruction of a country, I'd like to see the pictures from it. Where are the pictures?"

Have there been fewer pictures from this war than previous wars? "Oh, of course. Of course." How come, when everyone is out there making their own home movies? "They never make their way into the mainstream media because the mainstream media is a big corporation now, and they've got stockholders, and they don't like to put unpleasant pictures up on the air because you can't sell advertising and you're showing a depressing view of the war." In Vietnam, he says, at least sufficient images found their way home to enable people to make an informed decision on the war. But that was the lesson the US government learned from Vietnam - if you're going to fight an unpopular war, make sure photographs of scorched girls running for their lives don't reach the public.

Did he anticipate such hostility to the film? "I knew if I was critical of the soldiers I would get a very strong reaction, because the way the soldiers have been portrayed in the mainstream media has always been as valiant warriors making the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom and liberty of America." He talks about his other controversial movies - Dressed To Kill, the erotic thriller Body Double and the über-violent Scarface for starters - and says he's used to the pickets and incendiary headlines. Then he stops. Actually, he says, they weren't quite the same. "What I didn't think is that nobody would want to see Redacted. Even the good reviews said, 'Well, this is very difficult to watch.' So that was surprising - that they just don't want to see any movies about Iraq."

He says the mistake that his detractors make is to see this film as simply an attack on the US military. It's an easy mistake to make - their behaviour is unforgivable. Yes, says, De Palma, but that's not the point. "When you have a terrible crime, you want to know how these boys were brought to do this, and that's what the movie shows." And what did bring them to do it? "They are very young. They are taken to a place that they have no idea of or experience of, a very hostile environment, it's very hot, they're carrying 120 pounds of gear on their back, they don't know why they're there because the reasons they are given could be false. They are surrounded by a mysterious and hostile populace. The only logic they can make of why they're doing what they're doing is protecting themselves and their buddies, and then their buddy gets blown up or assassinated, and they turn all their frustration on that populace out there."

Everything about this war, he says, is futile and relentless. Even the landscape in Iraq is hopeless: rubble and wasteland. "In Vietnam there were beaches, tropics; this is a gritty environment."

War and rape are recurrent themes in De Palma's work. "It's a metaphor for my feeling of what America did to Vietnam and what we're doing to Iraq. We come in, we destroy, we rape, we kill and then we leave. The girl represents the innocent country." But it's more than a metaphor, isn't it? "If you're going to rape a country, why not rape its women at the same time," he says baldly. De Palma believes that the consequences of an unjust war are felt for generations, and he quotes one of his characters. "McCoy says you have to have a very good reason to go out and kill people. Because if you don't, it twists you all up inside, and we will be suffering the repercussions of those soldiers that will never be able to deal with the experience of killing women and children for generations."

He is happy to see his film as a form of counter-propaganda. "I want people to try to understand a little better how and why this terrible crime was committed, and how it tells us a lot about our whole occupation and invasion of Iraq."

In some ways, Nick Broomfield's Battle For Haditha is eerily similar to Redacted. Again, it is shot more like a reconstruction than a traditional movie, using no recognisable stars (in this case, mainly non-professional actors), and again it is unremittingly bleak. Both films are based on true stories and have pretty much the same starting and finishing points. In the Iraqi town of Haditha, on November 19 2005, a marine was killed by an insurgent bomb. On the same day, 24 civilians were killed. Initial reports said that 15 had died from the bomb blast and the others in subsequent fighting with US soldiers. But an amateur video, shot by an Iraqi the day after the killings, told a very different story - this had been a massacre. Five men in a taxi had been lined up and shot on the spot, and nearly all the others had been shot in their homes, including seven women and three children, the youngest aged three. Haditha has been called Iraq's My Lai. Four marines faced charges of unpremeditated murder, which were later dropped. Squadron leader Frank Wuterich, who was charged with 12 counts of unpremeditated murder, could still face jail if convicted on charges of voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, dereliction of duty or obstruction of justice.

Broomfield tells the story from three perspectives - that of the marines, the two insurgents who plant the bomb and the Iraqi family living in the vicinity. Although the atrocity is every bit as shocking as that depicted in Redacted, Broomfield's film is more nuanced, more humane. Battle For Haditha starts with a series of talking heads - the marines who go on to slaughter the innocents. "What d'you want to know?" asks one boy-man, who looks as if he has not even started shaving. "I live in a shit barracks. Constant threat. I get shot at any minute through every window. I wake up every morning and do the same patrols every day and basically the only thing I'm fighting for, that I know I'm fighting for, is to make it home every day without being killed, because I don't know why we're here." We sympathise with all three sides. The marine largely responsible for the carnage begged to see a doctor before the incident because he was having nightmares - and was refused permission; the older insurgent was a former Iraqi soldier given negligible compensation when the US disbanded the army; the Iraqi family are warm and loving.

Broomfield has not yet found a US distributor for his film. Is that because nobody wants to see films such as this or because distributors have lost confidence in them? "With a couple of million dollars' P&A [promotion and advertising] behind it, one would have a chance." How much has he got behind it? "Well, nothing." But he knows he's having his cake and eating it. This is a guerrilla movie, divorced from the mainstream. Of course, Broomfield doesn't expect a lavish Hollywood-style marketing spree.

He talks more like a campaigning journalist than a movie-maker. Like De Palma, he feels that while there are so few official images provided of body bags and charred victims, it has become the film-maker's role to act as an official recorder. And because they are so angry that the truth has been withheld from the public, they are all the more determined to make their films hard-core.

If there is such a need to chronicle the war, why are the films struggling for an audience? Broomfield points out that the films from Vietnam were made years after the event, when it was no longer so raw. "The other main difference is there was conscription in Vietnam and middle-class college kids were being killed. Here, it's just the poor and dispossessed being killed in Iraq. Nobody needs to deal with it. The rich don't need to deal with - it's Puerto Ricans and white trash being killed in America." However savage the portrayal of Vietnam in Apocalypse Now, made six years after the end of the war, it is obvious to viewers that this is fiction (indeed, it is based on Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness). At least to that extent, we are let off the hook.

The "stars" of Broomfield's film are the very troops he's talking about - former marines who have given desperately convincing performances and now hope to establish themselves as actors. Broomfield calls it real cinema - real people shot in real locations. Now, with cameras so portable, you can shoot on the run, use non-professional actors for long takes and not worry if they screw up because the video is so cheap. "For non-actors you need to make things real, and part of that is you don't have them hit marks and spots and deliver particular lines, and you don't keep stopping them."

As much as anything, he says, these films are about the evolution of technology. "If you look at the story of film, it started off on massive sound stages and was influenced by the theatre. Because the equipment was gigantic, you couldn't move it. Then, when you could move the cameras, you got cinéma vérité, and a different way of film-making. So with each technological leap, a whole new school of film-making develops. Especially in De Palma's film - you couldn't possibly have done that a few years ago."

Initially, Broomfield says, things got too real and he feared he might have to stop filming. "The guy who plays the younger insurgent had lost three brothers in Fallujah, and when he learned that some of the marines had been in Fallujah, he wanted to have a confrontation with them. I thought it would be impossible to make, but after two or three weeks they became good friends and were amazed by how much they liked each other. In Iraq, these marines had never really got to know anybody else as human beings - initially, they were full of 'Arabs are dirty' and 'You can't trust them'."

In the second world war, many directors felt it their patriotic duty to make feel-good films to boost the allied effort. Back then, John Wayne was virtually a one-man propaganda machine, starring in Flying Tigers, The Fighting Seabees, Back To Bataan and They Were Expendable - all made between 1942 and 1945. "The Nazis were the horrible enemy," Broomfield says. "They were an easier bad guy than anything that we had in Vietnam or now." Actually, he says, even the Vietnam films had something of a heroic nature, however damaged the soldiers it depicted and however pointless the war it portrayed. Most told the stories of disillusioned stoners who couldn't make sense of what was going on. And yet, even then, it was a simpler war - soldiers knew why they were there, to fight the Commies, even if they disagreed with the rationale. "In the Vietnam films by Oliver Stone, there was a kind of grandeur, an epic quality about them. Iraq is a grubby war. I don't think there's any glory in these films. This is a war where the best footage is all shot by the people on the ground; either the insurgents shoot footage or the American troops shoot footage, and that's probably also influenced the way people depict the war."

Broomfield says making the film left him traumatised. "I used to have nightmares editing it - that I was directing this massacre. For months on end. It was quite haunting, and it did stay with me rather too long."

In The Valley Of Elah, again based on a true story, makes up a trilogy of Iraq bad-apple movies. Directed by double Oscar winner Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby), it is more conventional than the Broomfield and De Palma pictures. It has a conventional narrative (a father determines to find out how his soldier son, just home from Iraq, died), it belongs to a cosier genre (murder mystery) and it has stars (Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon and Charlize Theron). But at its heart is another unspeakable act committed by the military.

In The Valley Of Elah has also failed commercially. Rightwing groups have labelled it "Bin Laden cinema" and called for it to be boycotted. Haggis's inspiration also came from trawling the web. He was horrified by the blogs soldiers were posting - a shot of a kid with a burned corpse talking to it as if to a buddy, a soldier picking up a dismembered hand and waving it as if it were his own. "I said, 'My God, what is happening?' I know these to be good men and women. These are kids; these are good kids they are sending there."

Since making the film, Haggis has screened it to soldiers and has been shocked by further discoveries. "There is the highest suicide rate in the military in 30 years right now. I was screening this film for some troops and their family members in Washington DC, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said, 'Thanks so much, it was a really hard film to watch. My husband was in active duty, and when he came back he hung himself.' Then another woman came up and said, 'Thanks for making the film. It was really hard to watch because I saw my son in it. He was in Iraq, and the first week back he shot himself.' I walked out and another woman came up to me and said, 'My husband was an Iraq war vet. I was really afraid for the first two weeks until he hung himself.' "These are three women who didn't know each other and this is within seven minutes of me walking out of the theatre. What the fuck is going on?"

Haggis has asked the same question as De Palma - where are the images? "During the Vietnam war, photos were shown that were disturbing, like the one on the evening news of the young child burned by napalm." He doesn't bother asking why they have been excised from the network screens. "It's not brain surgery that when you see a picture of a kid with no head, you can't sell deodorant any more."

Not all the movies to have emerged from Iraq have been so relentlessly feel-bad. But none has been a box-office smash. Rendition, about the kidnap of an Egyptian-American by US authorities who suspect he's a terrorist, starred three Oscar winners - Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep and Alan Arkin. It took a disappointing $23m at the global box office. Robert Redford's speechy Lions For Lambs, about a US squadron in Afghanistan and boasting its own triumvirate of superstars (Tom Cruise, Redford and Streep again) cost $35m to make and took around $57m worldwide. Even though that may seem like a decent profit, when marketing costs are taken into account, it is not a success - a $100m return is the least that would have been expected. Little wonder New York magazine called it "a critical flop and a box-office bomb". A Mighty Heart, the true story of Marianne Pearl's search for her husband, the journalist Daniel Pearl, starred Angelina Jolie and managed $19m at the box office. Grace Is Gone, which stars John Cusack and features original music written by Clint Eastwood, tells the story of a father who does not want to tell his two children that their soldier mother died in Iraq. The film was made for a tiny $2m, but it has taken a much tinier $50,899 at the box office after being released last December in only four American theatres. Despite winning the Audience award at last year's Sundance Film Festival, Time Out New York gave it minus one star and dismissed it as "grief porn". Perhaps the most successful film about the "war on terror" is The Kingdom, which had grossed $83m by the end of last year; perhaps not surprisingly, although it is a story about Arabs, terrorists and bombs, it is not actually about Iraq, bares little relationship to reality and works as an escapist thriller.

Of all the recent antiwar films, it is De Palma's that has caused the biggest outcry. Despite its award at Venice, and the many column inches it garnered, Redacted was released in only 15 theatres in the US last November and on its first weekend took a paltry $25,628. The latest figures show it has taken $500,000 worldwide.

The pugnacious De Palma has found himself at odds not only with the neocons and a reluctant audience, he has also found himself in conflict with his own producer. Although he was promised he could make the film as he wanted for $5m by Mark Cuban, it didn't quite turn out that way. The film ends with a montage of still photographs (some taken by the Guardian's Ghaith Abdul-Ahad) of war victims - the maimed and the dead. Cuban insisted that the faces be disguised to protect families or those still living. De Palma was outraged, saying that the photographs had already been seen in the press and were available on the internet, and that it would be impossible to obtain permission for usage. He called it an act of censorship.

While De Palma is undoubtedly disgruntled, you can't help sensing he enjoys the irony of his film Redacted being redacted. Has he fallen out with Cuban? "I was very unhappy that my pictures got redacted," he says with a stony face. Didn't Cuban offer him the opportunity to buy the film back from him, though? "That's not true. He never offered me that opportunity, he never answered my phone calls." He gave up on the film? "Absolutely - he didn't want to be associated with those photographs."

I ask why he thinks so few people have watched his movie in the US - lack of opportunity, the call for boycotts, they don't believe it's true, the lack of narrative, the radical format, they don't regard it as entertainment? "A combination of all those things," De Palma replies. "It's reported that it's all not true, that it's a very negative representation of the soldiers, and even though it happened, this is a tiny part of the military and why would anybody make a movie like this. And even the people who like it say, well, this is an extremely difficult film to watch."

Does he find it difficult to watch? "It's pretty tough material, yes. But I found Casualties Of War hard to watch, too." Is Redacted harder to watch? "Yes, it's very sad material."

But he is convinced its time will come. He says that it's a film ahead of its time, and reminds me that the earliest Vietnam movies were made years after the war finished. "Redacted deals with very moving material in a very new form and it may take a while for people to adjust to it. In time, they will come to accept it because all the information the Bush administration has been suppressing will come out and we'll learn the terrible stories that they've been hiding from us for so long. Whether it finds it this year or in years to come, I just think the movie will find its audience."

The media's job is to interest the public in the public interest. -John Dewey

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